Thursday, March 19, 2015

Search engine optimization has significantly changed in recent years much to the amiss of Google’s guidelines. As you move into 2015 and look to grow your website’s organic traffic, what will be most important for you to use for on-page SEO? Here’s a list of on-page SEO techniques that you are probably already using but are still important in 2015 and also some newer developments in SEO that you should consider in your strategy.

Include these On-Page SEO Tips in Your 2015 Strategy:

1. Optimize Your Site Page Around One Keyword or Topic

The days of keyword “stuffing” are over, but you still need to keep your site pages optimized around one central idea and keyword. Keywords should appear in important on-page elements like the page title, heading, image alt text, and naturally throughout the page copy, but you should still be sure to craft each of these items for humans, not search engines

2. Remember that Keywords Are Important But Not Verbatim

Considering Google announced in 2014 that their paid search services, AdWords, would no longer rely on exact match keywords but also co-varieties of a keyword, it is likely that the same holds true for organic search, although it has not been explicitly announced. Keywords no longer need to be the exact same variation as displayed in your keyword tool. For example, the plural keyword, “inbound marketing tactics”, is equivalent to “inbound marketing tactic” in singular form with AdWord’s new targeting strategy. In addition, even if a searcher misspells, Google will still help them find your website despite the variation of the keyword optimized on your site.

3. URL Structure Should Be Short, Descriptive and Help to Categorize Your Website

A URL is one of the first things a search engine uses to determine page rank, which is why it is really important to make your URLs easy to crawl. You can do this by keeping URLs short (this is also beneficial for UX), aligning to the page’s topic and keyword, and ensuring that URLs help you to categorize your site pages.

4. Optimize Page Titles

A title tag is used by search engines to display a page in search results and can also be found at the top of your browser. Title tags tell search engines and searchers what the page is about. Since Google will only display between 50-60 characters in the title tag, you should keep title tags under 55 characters and try to drive people to click with compelling copy. You should also put keywords or topics towards the front of the title.

Wednesday, March 18, 2015

No SEO means no visitors from search engines. If you don’t do it then search engines can’t categorise and rank your site for keywords relevant to your business.

Both on-site SEO and off-site SEO are required. You can’t achieve good results doing one without the other.

Start doing SEO now. The longer you leave it to start, the further ahead your competitors will be, and the harder it becomes to rank higher than them.

Know your competition. Find out what the sites ranking on the 1st page for the keywords that you want to rank for have done, on-site and off-site, to get there.

No two websites are the same. An SEO strategy that worked for someone else’s site isn’t guaranteed to work for yours because there are so many variables.

SEO doesn’t have to be expensive. You can get big results on a small budget if you invest time in creating good content and building online relationships.

SEO results aren’t instant. The results of SEO work done today might not become apparent, and might not be credited by search engines, for weeks, or even months.

The newer your website is, the more patient you will need to be. It takes time to build authority and trust, and until you’ve developed both, you shouldn’t expect to outrank older, more established sites.

Never consider your website to be finished. If you want your site to continue to rank higher, attract more visitors and make more sales, then you should always be adding to and improving it.

Adapt to algorithm updates. To attain and retain good rankings you need to adapt your SEO strategy as search engines evolve over time.